Brainstorming, the 'no idea is too wacko' process, used by many as the key and sometimes the only technique in the drive to be ‘innovative', is no where near as productive as we think.
The problem is, that like a storm, it is finite in time and has an effect only in a localised area. After the storm we get the blue skies, and everybody feels good but forgets what the storm did. All the ideas, like the rain, wash away, the energy dies down and every one goes back to a normal life, doing what they do and have done.
It is just the start. We need to collect the rain and the wind and put it in a place where others can see it and play with them.
Rarely does any great idea come up in Isolation, and great ideas can take months, even years to come to fruition. Tim Berners-Lee, actually took ten years from his first ‘Enquire‘ progamme, his first idea for information sharing, to turn this into what we all use now, the www. and only then as his idea was put into an environment where it was allowed to be encouraged at CERN.
Ideas need to connect to other ideas , they need to be put into places where they can be played with or tweaked or indulged a little.
That is innovation management.
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